Like People in History

by Felice Picano

  Three bodies. All of them alone. Given the way his body was twisted and the contortions of his facial features, only one man had come to consciousness during the fire. It seemed to have been a momentary awareness, a rising out of sleep perhaps, though much too late for him to do anything but claw his way out the cubicle door, then retreat back inside from the smoke, and lie huddled down, and choke to death. The others both appeared to have been overcome by fumes in their sleep. Possibly drugged sleep, I thought. Doubtless exhausted-after-sexual-climax-sleep. I'd seen two of the men before. Even knew the name of one. Ironically, it turned out that a cardboard pane had been installed instead of a window on the other side of the pressboard wall in one cubicle. Had he known it and awakened, he might have punched a hole, crawled onto the ledge—and lived.

  I remained outside the line of cubicles while the captain left and returned with a Homicide photographer and Forensic detectives, both of whose names I took down. I witnessed them opening the wallets and I.D.-ing each victim. Then I went with another firefighter looking for any more hidden rooms.

  We didn't find any. Only the three on the top floor.

  That's what I corroborated with Captain Fahey and a lieutenant from Arson Division once we were down on the street again. I saw a few reporters from the daily city desks of big papers, and I told them. My job was now done; once they moved in with their sharklike instincts for news, I could leave.

  "Can I have that back?" Fahey asked.

  I looked down at the fire axe I was still gripping.

  Only then did I realize I'd also been clenching my teeth for maybe the past hour,

  Fahey made a big show of shaking my hand.

  "You were right," I said. "I wanted to barf a half dozen times."

  "But you didn't," Fahey said, still holding my hand. "I've got ten-year men wouldn't have poked around like you did, looking for what you didn't want to find."

  "You don't get it! I could have been one of those guys."

  And when he didn't respond, I tried again.

  "Those three? They're... We're like... brothers!"

  "Ah!" he said quickly, darkly, with a look of agony. So he did understand.

  "By the way, you happen to count the ceiling sprinklers?" I asked.

  He looked at me as though I were crazy and began laughing. I could still hear him guffawing as I threaded my way through the hook-and-ladders down the block.

  Sydelle Auslander jumped up from a doorway where she'd been sitting doing the Times crossword puzzle. "Forrest said to call him right away. There's a pay phone in there!"

  A Greek luncheonette. She was smart enough to have taken the receiver off the hook so no one else could use it, to have found us a booth, and to have ordered me coffee and a bear claw for when I was done telling our editor everything I knew. I gobbled up the pastry in seconds.

  "You were awfully brave," Sydelle started to say.

  I thought, Come on, Harriet! Certain she was putting me on with all the bullshit about how she could never go into the building like I had.

  "We were afraid of a cover-up. Interdepartmental collusion," I quickly said, watching her closely. "You know, no bodies—no fire!" She picked at her corn muffin.

  I kept thinking, Okay, she doesn't smoke cigarettes.... She's drinking juice, not black coffee. ,.. Her fingernails aren't bitten halfway down the digits.... Her makeup isn't off a sixteenth of an inch.... Why then does she seem to be a complete nervous wreck?

  I ordered more food. When the waitress was gone, Sydelle said, "I asked to come here, today. Instead of Bernard."

  That was news. I'd assumed Harte was up to something, throwing us together, hoping we'd act human toward each other. I'd meant to ask him during the call, but forgot in the barrage of his questions about the fire.

  "The reason I asked," she went on, "was I wanted to be alone with you when I asked why it is that you act like... well, not like Marcy Lorimer says she knows you to be."

  I could have acted surprised, but on some level I'd been expecting this question for a month.

  "You're not Marcy," I said by way of explanation. "You're an employee. Not an old friend." "What I mean is. why are you acting like by my being here I'm taking something from you?"

  She said it with intensity, and immediately pulled away from her question, as though dissociating herself from it, or allowing it to stand on its own and do its own work.

  Was I really acting like that?

  "You are, you know," she answered my unspoken question, which only half fazed me: I like to think my basic honesty shows up on my face, in my attitude. "And you shouldn't," she said. "You have everything you could want!"

  Her assurance amused me. "Oh, I do, do I?"

  "You have a great job that pays well and has the potential for shaping and influencing gays all over the country. You've got terrific connections in the arts and media. You get tickets to everything. I hear you've got a nice apartment, rent-stabilized. You take a big house with great views in the Pines. You have interesting and talented friends. You're good-looking, with a nice body. You're healthy and relatively well-off. You have a handsome, famous lover, whom every gay in the city envies you for... despite the rumors."

  I'd been listening to her, rapt, wondering exactly how much longer she intended buttering me up, and where exactly she was heading, until she'd arrived at that last, intriguing, problematic phrase.

  "What rumors are those? That we're breaking up?"

  She began to waffle until I gave her my own brand of "deadeye."

  "Well... he is reportedly seen out with other guys."

  "Thad Harbison is the only other guy! I know all about it. Completely platonic! Not that all of Matt's—or my own—affairs, for that matter, have been without sex. We're liberated. We've been together a few years. We have an open marriage."

  "The rumors I meant weren't about Thad but..."

  But what? She was holding firm. And of course, simultaneously withdrawing into objectivity.

  "...about Matt's background," she said.

  His background? Did she mean the war?

  "Matt was a gunner on a Navy destroyer and served in Southeast Asia," I said. "He received a medical discharge after two tours. Medal of

  Honor. He's not particularly proud of it. Neither will he deny it. Matt was a kid when he joined up. Satisfied?"

  "I didn't know he was in Nam or wounded. I was talking about something else in his background... his family."

  "What about his family?"

  "Loguidice Carting in Rye is the largest private sanitation contractor in three counties."

  "What's that have to do with Matt?"

  "Don't you know? I mean, he's your lover for how many years and you don't even know your lover is a major Mafia princeling!"

  "He's what?" I began to laugh. "Wait a minute here, Mizz Auslander! The reason I know little about Matt's family is that he has virtually nothing to do with them! He talks to his folks maybe once a month on die phone. Sees them maybe once a year. He's hardly Al Capone's heir.... If what you're saying about Loguidice Carting being connected to the mob is even true..."

  "It's true. When I was a reporter in White Plains, I found out all about private sanitation contractors upstate."

  "...And even if they are crooked, it's Matt's grandfather who owns it, for Chrissakes! Not Matt. Even his dad has nothing to do with it."

  "What kind of work does his father do?" she asked.

  I'd never heard that Matt's father ever held a job. "He doesn't. He has some sort of medical history...." I left it vague, since that was all I really knew. "The old man, Matt's Grandpa Loguidice, pretty much takes care of the family. Which," I was fast to add, "doesn't mean he's Mafia. I've met the old man maybe twice in all these years. He wasn't even close to being Mr. Monster. Any other rumors?"

  None evidently, since she was silent. My breakfast arrived and I attacked it. After being withdrawn with her juice for a while, she said, "Okay, maybe I'm out of line with all those rumors."

&n
bsp; "Matt would probably be tickled to hear them. I, however, am offended for him. And for his ethnicity."

  "I said I apologize! Let's get back to the magazine. What I'm saying is I just want a chance there."

  "The cri de coeur of every assistant editor hired! Look, it's nothing personal," I said. "I just happen to think it's an especially stupid idea having women's stuff in Manifest. It'll be patronizing to the few women readers we have and ignored by the many men readers. Harte knows where I stand. I told him he ought to start another, different magazine and have you write for it."

  "I see," she said quietly.

  "That's where I stand."

  "But right now you're stuck... with me," she said.

  So it seemed.

  "Why not make the best of it?" she asked. And before I could say something snide: "I'll keep the Manifest attitude in all my articles. Brash, irreverent!"

  "Evidently, you've given this some thought."

  "I've worked up some ideas. Articles on women that gay male readers will enjoy. For example, the meanest women in movies. Complete with photos. Crawford. Davis. Stanwyck."

  "'Golden Bitches of the Flicks!'" I said.

  "Or motorcycle girl clubs on the West Coast. 'Dykes on Bikes!' Maybe a full-page color photo of one tough chick on the inside back cover...?"

  "No! That's prime advertising territory. Inside front cover and back cover, inside and out. But anywhere else inside the book's possible. As long as it doesn't get in the way of the male centerfold."

  "It won't."

  "What else?" I asked.

  I listened for the next half hour to suggestions. I guessed she'd already run them by Harte, and even talked to Newell Rose, since she gave visual touches with his undeniable stamp.

  The result was that I opened myself up to possibilities, and she felt she'd cracked the door open. I knew Harte was going to be breathing down my back about her work, so I might as well get the best I could. More important, I wanted her to take a load off me. Copyediting articles and stories, captioning, and fact checking were tiresome and time-consuming. If I kept her happy, allowed her to think we were a team, she'd take on more work, help me and the Grunt.

  I finished my third cup of coffee and said, "Put together three trial articles. Use anyone in the office except the Grunt. Bernard," I explained. "Can you be ready in a week?"

  "Can I ever."

  When we got outside, Newell had arrived with his ancient Hasselblad camera and was making the usual nuisance of himself with firemen and cops. I left Sydelle with him, hoping they'd keep each other from getting into too much trouble.

  "I'm glad we had this talk," she said, following me as I got into a taxi down to the magazine's office. She sounded sincere.

  "Mafia princeling!" I scoffed when the taxi took off.

  "What's that?" the cabbie asked.

  Even so, I wondered: How much did I know about Matt's family? I'd never met his parents, though they lived an hour away by car. I'd spoken to his mother on the phone, true, but just to exchange one-liners, to say, "Matt isn't here. I'll say you called," or "Sure, I'll get him." She'd never made conversation with me while waiting, not even about the weather, for which I'd been grateful. As for Grandpa Loguidice, as I'd told Sydelle, I'd met him twice, each time in a different expensive midtown restaurant, where he'd treated Matt to dinner.

  A heavyset, almost round, man in his late seventies, the senior Loguidice resembled his grandson in size—he was almost six feet tall—in the vibrant black of what little hair remained on the sides of his head, and in the entire lower half of his face—perfect Calabrian lips, astonishing dimples on either side of his mouth, a cleft chin!

  He'd been warm, welcoming, intelligent. His large, dark eyes— Matt's gray beauties came from his mother—were clever and curious. I'd been impressed by how at ease old Loguidice had been (Caravelle is way out of our range) even though he'd admitted he seldom "dined out. Only now a little since your Grandma passed on, God rest her soul!"

  Both times, Grandpa Loguidice mentioned that he'd had a playmate named Roger he'd lost track of years before. There was no doubt at all that the old man ruled his family; yet with respect and with love. Doubtless, his money paid for many of their needs and all their luxuries. But he enjoyed independence in them—"Your cousin Sylvia, sixteen, tells me to go to hell. She says she'll pay for college and go wherever she wants!"

  I never had a hint that he was dictatorial. The proof was how many family members—two sons, a daughter-in-law, and two grandchildren—worked for his company.'

  I did get the sense he adored Matt: the way his eyes followed him doing anything—calling the waiter, say, or pouring the wine. He was proud of Matt's Navy service. He was even proud that he wrote poetry—"Can you imagine? A Loguidice a literary man with literary friends like yourself! Back in the Old Country, you know, only the nobilità read and wrote! Not gabons like us. A wonderful place, this America!"

  From what I'd been able to gather over the years about the Loguidice family, Matt's father was the youngest of four brothers. Sickly from youth, he'd been pampered and protected, first by his parents then by his siblings. Because of his sporadic long hospitalizations as a youth, he'd never finished school or held a job long, but he'd married early—"My parents are one of the great romances," Matt had once told me. "They married against everyone's wishes and expectations and haven't been apart a day since." Matt had been born a year later, their only child. And while Grandpa Loguidice had plenty of grandchildren by his other sons—"I could field a football team with 'em!" he'd said over dinner—Matt, son of his favorite son, had become his favorite grandchild from the moment that the old man called his "miraculous birth!"

  During those two meetings, I couldn't get any sense of whether or not old Loguidice knew Matt was gay and that we lived together. I definitely had the impression that Grandpa Loguidice had gotten around in his day. He possessed that quiet acceptance of things and people that suggests a widely lived past. The one time I'd pressed Matt on the subject, he'd irritatedly answered, "I could be sleeping with Rodan for all he cares!" Though I'd gone around the next week swooshing through the apartment as though on long, leathery wings, making what I thought were properly pterodactyl roars, Matt never said anything more. And his parents? They must know, I thought. "Who do they think I am?" I demanded. "The butler?" Matt had been vague about that too.

  He saw them only for Thanksgiving. His father's birthday was close to the holiday, which coincided with their wedding anniversary and other family birthdays. So Matt would take a train up to his grandfather's big house in Rye, where the entire Loguidice clan gathered, and he'd generally be away anywhere from a day to an entire weekend. He'd invited me twice. But it had seemed so much a family affair, I'd passed it up, and he'd never mentioned it again. When I'd asked what he did there, Matt answered, "Talk, eat, play cards, eat, play touch football, eat, rake leaves, eat, watch the game on TV, eat!"

  Christmas we spent together. Seasonal cards from his relatives were addressed to Matt, except those from his parents, who addressed both of us on the outside envelope and on the inside of the card itself. Lucille always signed the card in her neat elementary school penmanship, "Love, Dad and Mom."

  That was better than what we got from my parents, who seemed determined to remain blind to the true nature of our relationship, even though on their invitation, Matt and I spent nights in the guestroom at their new house in Oyster Bay twice a year, and we always pushed the twin beds together. Once we'd been in the shower loudly screwing when my mom opened the bathroom door a slit to ask if we minded her washing the underwear we'd dropped on the floor. Twice, when my dad decided to discuss investments and insurance and other monetary things with me, I'd insisted Matt be present since "Our bank accounts, all our resources, are combined!" All to no avail.

  I now thought that despite how much more time we actually spent in their company—both in town when they came in, and out on Long Island—and despite their chatting with us on the phone
, my own family must have seemed as mysterious and unknowable to Matt as his did to me. But wasn't that one point about our new gay lifestyle? That we'd formed our own family? Not based on blood, children, or ownership, but on shared tastes and pleasures, on the love of another?

  Even so, it would give me a louche sort of pleasure to be able to go around saying, "You know my lover, Matt Loguidice? The Mafia princeling!"

  I'd hoped to get back out to the Pines early that weekend to compensate for having come into the city early. But what with the magazine's accountants flying in from wherever the hell they hung out, then having to entertain both personal and magazine-related guests from out of town, I wasn't able to free myself until the middle of Saturday afternoon, when I hopped on a seaplane.

  "We've laid eyes on him maybe twice," Luis said when I asked where Matt was, "and we've been here all week."

  "You have?" I asked. I didn't hide my surprise. I'd arrived at Withering Heights ten minutes before, dropped my bag, ripped off my Lacoste, and thrown myself—still sneakered and rugby-shorted—upon a chaise longue in the welcome sun on the side deck, where my housemates had set themselves up for the afternoon—complete with portable tape deck, magazines, telephone, drinks, and prerolled joints.

  "We were all going to take off vacation time this week," Patrick said.

  "Not only us, but you too. Remember?" Luis asked.

  "Vaguely," I said. Of course, I remembered it now. We'd planned to all be together the entire first week in July and the third week of August. Thanks to the fucking magazine, I'd managed to miss both weeks.

  But I was more concerned with what Luis had just revealed about my lover, which seemed to confirm what I'd silently gnawed on all week. Matt had stayed out here, of course, not come into town at all. We'd talked by phone twice, each time brief as telegrams.

  "What you're trying to tell me," I said, "is that Matt's been with Thad all week?"

  "Tha-a-ad?" Patrick hooted. "Honey, you're so totally out of it, you're weeks behind the dish on your own husband."

  "Don't insult me! Just bring me up to date!"